The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
If you compare stock market performance to living standards Capital is doing better than Labour atm.
I agree your general thrust btw. A more equal outcome before fiscal redistribution is better than relying wholly on the latter to mitigate the problem.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Nothing new.
" [...] right wing commentators lamented its validation of the poor, believing that it would stifle innovation [...], and also encourage the labouring classes to breed. The left resented the fact that it effectively provided a subsidy for rich [...] [employers], who were free to profit from inflation in goods without passing on increases in wages."
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
I don’t agree with that. According to the ONS there are 8.5 million part time workers, defined by fewer than 30 hours a week, and the average hours worked is 16.7 hours (2023 analysis).
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
I don’t agree with that. According to the ONS there are 8.5 million part time workers, defined by fewer than 30 hours a week, and the average hours worked is 16.7 hours (2023 analysis).
So the average UC recipient works 4 hours more per week than the average part-time worker.* That might suggest work incentives are stronger for claimants than others.
The Thatcher and Major governments were excellent for the creative arts and popular culture in this country.
In an alternative universe maybe.
Of course the Wilson Government heralded the British invasion of America and punk was a product of antithesis towards the Callaghan government and authority in general. What did Heath bring to the party? Glam rock!
The main features were Thatcher reduced the Arts Council role, and drove it towards commercial sponsorship, and that John Major brought in the National Lottery which generated a lot of money.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
Yes, pop music today is still reflecting the negative impact of the 2008 Crash on the economy and wages. Plus the decline of marriage and the rise of shortterm hookups relative to the 1980s
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
Khan stopped buying buses made in the U.K. for TfL…
Hmm - strange statement given that Transport UK have Wrightbus is their preferred supplier and bought 75 buses in the past year.
I was referring to the new Routemasters. Which despite cutting off upgrades etc. are refusing to die.
The replacement is the WrightBus SRM (Son of Routemaster).
Granted the Wikipedia article references a BYD single decker bus as the replacement that's not the case, route masters are double decker to match the capacity required on the routes.
It's sad to say this but I will be happily catching the bus from my hotel to client co on Tuesday / Wednesday next week - it's probably a WrightBus SRM given the route (94)
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
That I think is where it will go out of necessity - the alternative being to choke. But strategically that means alternatives to the big US-centric systems, Mastercard/VISA, the tech bro services and the rest, or sufficient clout to stop the US even potentially using them as a lever.
And imo THAT is a 5-25 year project, with the EU as probably the key body especially to defend the rule of law.
I think Europe's main advantage is that Trump has his head in the mid-20C about the USA's domination. But Europe (including me) perhaps has similar over-estimates of our own influence.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
On topic, I spent my youth with rock 'n roll, followed by The Beatles and The Wurzles. Music was FUN!
I was at a funeral in 2023 at an abbey church in Cumbria, c 1150, with hundreds of people attending. For half an hour before the start we all stood outside listening to a bank of loudspeakers playing 'I've got a brand new combine harvester'.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
No it shouldn't, the 2 child benefit cap should have been kept. Instead child benefit could have been increased for average families rather than those on Universal Credit.
The minimum wage in the UK is also very high now, £24,000 for full time workers. In the US by contrast the full time minimum wage is only about $15,000 a year and even in France only about 21,000 Euros per year
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
No it shouldn't, the 2 child benefit cap should have been kept. Instead child benefit could have been increased for average families rather than those on Universal Credit.
The minimum wage now in the UK is also very high now, £24,000 for full time workers. In the US by contrast the full time minimum wage is only about $15,000 a year and even in France only about 21,000 Euros per year
The US is not an example for anything beyond the fact that employers will get away with blue murder given the ability to do so.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
The Thatcher and Major governments were excellent for the creative arts and popular culture in this country.
In an alternative universe maybe.
Of course the Wilson Government heralded the British invasion of America and punk was a product of antithesis towards the Callaghan government and authority in general. What did Heath bring to the party? Glam rock!
Well yes, but the Thatcher years were great for pop music, albeit despite or in reaction against her, not because of her, if you see what I mean. Would we have had The Specials, Talk Talk, Wham, The Pet Shop Boys, Happy Mondays if the times and social changes had been different?
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
No it shouldn't, the 2 child benefit cap should have been kept. Instead child benefit could have been increased for average families rather than those on Universal Credit.
The minimum wage now in the UK is also very high now, £24,000 for full time workers. In the US by contrast the full time minimum wage is only about $15,000 a year and even in France only about 21,000 Euros per year
The US is not an example for anything beyond the fact that employers will get away with blue murder given the ability to do so.
Yes but given the average wage in the US is $63,000 and the average wage in the UK is £37,000 and the minimum wage is much higher in the UK than the US, it doesn't make sense in the UK for employers to pay not far off the average wage to employ lots of low skilled employees. Hence US unemployment is now 4% and UK unemployment is 5% and rising
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
Depeche Mode - Master and Servant - Sado masochist sexual encounters.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
It is pretty one-note (pun) in that Fil analyses tracks to see if they've been autotuned, but one recent finding is that official music channels have been quietly replacing classic tracks with pitch-corrected versions.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
Wasn’t Peel cancelled post death for his ‘noncing’/‘sexual predatory behaviour’ ?
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
Depeche Mode - Master and Servant - Sado masochist sexual encounters.
Yes, but we were talking "songs which cover other matters"
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
Depeche Mode - Master and Servant - Sado masochist sexual encounters.
Yes, but we were talking "songs which cover other matters"
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
Khan stopped buying buses made in the U.K. for TfL…
You can hardly blame him for the failure of our manufacturing to compete.
The buses were in service (new Routemasters). He decided to stop buying them, mostly as a political “stop doing the thing the other guy was doing” act.
Edit: The price was inflated by claiming that the development cost was always included at the original rate, rather than spread across all the buses bought. So, over time the price was decreasing.
A good example of the paralysing effect of legalism on politics from Darren Jones: "It's not for politicians to make judgements around international law."
@williamglenn , @viewcode here. Thank you for that: I didn't know there was a word ("legalism") for the phenomenon where MPs abdicate their decisions to law bodies. I've been reading Sumption recently and he is scathing about it. Do you have any other examples?
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
Wasn’t Peel cancelled post death for his ‘noncing’/‘sexual predatory behaviour’ ?
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Strongly agree.
Though I'm also fond of the Baroque period.
All depends what you mean by 'music'. For me, in its principal meaning, it lasts from Bach until the death of Shostakovich and it is irreplaceable but as yet I have no really strong evidence that it is capable of being continued and extended.
For the rest, there are three factors which individually and collectively degrade it. The earliest work in which being unable to sing is an asset really ended with fairly early Bob Dylan and has not worked well since; secondly the increasing use of electronic forms and artificially multiplied sound has stifled originality; thirdly money.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
I put together a playlist for WW3, which is motly Eighties:
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
A good example of the paralysing effect of legalism on politics from Darren Jones: "It's not for politicians to make judgements around international law."
@williamglenn , @viewcode here. Thank you for that: I didn't know there was a word ("legalism") for the phenomenon where MPs abdicate their decisions to law bodies. I've been reading Sumption recently and he is scathing about it. Do you have any other examples?
The alternative to reliance on law is, of course, pure force. We are not well prepared for that world.
It's striking how in US discussions the legality of this action is framed almost entirely in terms of domestic law & Congressional authority, as if it's self-evident that if it's legal at home then it must be legal abroad. Implication is any DoJ indictment is license to use force. https://x.com/shashj/status/2007755594044768381
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Just enough or even not quite enough has been the case for most people for most of history. It was certainly the case for me for the first 5 years after leaving uni.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
A good example of the paralysing effect of legalism on politics from Darren Jones: "It's not for politicians to make judgements around international law."
@williamglenn , @viewcode here. Thank you for that: I didn't know there was a word ("legalism") for the phenomenon where MPs abdicate their decisions to law bodies. I've been reading Sumption recently and he is scathing about it. Do you have any other examples?
The alternative to reliance on law is, of course, pure force. We are not well prepared for that world.
It's striking how in US discussions the legality of this action is framed almost entirely in terms of domestic law & Congressional authority, as if it's self-evident that if it's legal at home then it must be legal abroad. Implication is any DoJ indictment is license to use force. https://x.com/shashj/status/2007755594044768381
That can work well, for example the British using the abolition of slavery in our territories as justification for the West Africa Squadron hitting slave ships of all nations in international waters however I’m not sure Trump and co have the same decent motivations.
A good example of the paralysing effect of legalism on politics from Darren Jones: "It's not for politicians to make judgements around international law."
@williamglenn , @viewcode here. Thank you for that: I didn't know there was a word ("legalism") for the phenomenon where MPs abdicate their decisions to law bodies. I've been reading Sumption recently and he is scathing about it. Do you have any other examples?
The alternative to reliance on law is, of course, pure force. We are not well prepared for that world.
It's striking how in US discussions the legality of this action is framed almost entirely in terms of domestic law & Congressional authority, as if it's self-evident that if it's legal at home then it must be legal abroad. Implication is any DoJ indictment is license to use force. https://x.com/shashj/status/2007755594044768381
No, I meant the phenomenon where political decisions are subcontracted to law. The choice whether to ally with the US is a political choice regardless of the legality of its actions. And, as your quote points out, Trump has replaced the authorisation of war by Congress (an elected political forum) with the Attorney-General (an appointed law officer), and Congress is entirely comfortable with this emasculation.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
£20k universal credit plus unlimited numbers of children able to claim universal credit for plus social housing subsidised and no tax, why work? Labour is paying you not to and even with full time minimum wage of £24k any extra income earnt gets taken by the Labour government in tax to subsidise the welfare you would otherwise get.
Any universal credit income over £20k should certainly be subject to income tax
A good example of the paralysing effect of legalism on politics from Darren Jones: "It's not for politicians to make judgements around international law."
@williamglenn , @viewcode here. Thank you for that: I didn't know there was a word ("legalism") for the phenomenon where MPs abdicate their decisions to law bodies. I've been reading Sumption recently and he is scathing about it. Do you have any other examples?
The alternative to reliance on law is, of course, pure force. We are not well prepared for that world.
It's striking how in US discussions the legality of this action is framed almost entirely in terms of domestic law & Congressional authority, as if it's self-evident that if it's legal at home then it must be legal abroad. Implication is any DoJ indictment is license to use force. https://x.com/shashj/status/2007755594044768381
Er no.
*Lawmakers* abdicating running the country to procedural legalism isn’t just about obeying the law.
It’s about giving up on doing anything.
The classic example of this is the US - Congress and the Senate have gradually given up on meaningful lawmaking (how long since a full budget was passed?).
Instead they, essentially, raised the Supreme Court to be the third legislative chamber.
And now that Trump controls that, he has the whole government.
A signpost is the recent trans ruling in the U.K. Supreme Court. The court said, quite specifically, they weren’t legislating or creating new law. And that if the Government wanted a different result, they should make different laws. No one seems to argue for a changed law - opponents of the ruling want the ruling changed, it seems.
Another - sure, the current law says (in effect) that any infrastructure project must take 20 years of lawfare and enquiries. But equally, the law makers can make different laws.
Trump came about, in part, from the logjam in Washington. “I will cut the Gordion Knot” etc.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
£20k universal credit plus unlimited numbers of children able to claim universal credit for plus social housing subsidised and no tax, why work? Labour is paying you not to and even with full time minimum wage of £24k any extra income earnt gets taken by the Labour government in tax to subsidise the welfare you would otherwise get
Because you'll get sanctioned and lose your UC unless you do.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
They seem to have run out of old #TOTP not hosted by sex offenders, but must have a vast collection of Old Grey Whistle Tests worthy of Friday night on BBC4.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
£20k universal credit plus unlimited numbers of children able to claim universal credit for plus social housing subsidised and no tax, why work? Labour is paying you not to and even with full time minimum wage of £24k any extra income earnt gets taken by the Labour government in tax to subsidise the welfare you would otherwise get
Because you'll get sanctioned and lose your UC unless you do.
In theory but plenty just game play by doing applications for jobs they don't really want and deliberately performing poorly at interview or even if they get the job walking out after a few weeks. If paid minimum wage work pays little more than top end universal credit after tax plenty will continue to do so
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
A good example of the paralysing effect of legalism on politics from Darren Jones: "It's not for politicians to make judgements around international law."
@williamglenn , @viewcode here. Thank you for that: I didn't know there was a word ("legalism") for the phenomenon where MPs abdicate their decisions to law bodies. I've been reading Sumption recently and he is scathing about it. Do you have any other examples?
The alternative to reliance on law is, of course, pure force. We are not well prepared for that world.
It's striking how in US discussions the legality of this action is framed almost entirely in terms of domestic law & Congressional authority, as if it's self-evident that if it's legal at home then it must be legal abroad. Implication is any DoJ indictment is license to use force. https://x.com/shashj/status/2007755594044768381
No, I meant the phenomenon where political decisions are subcontracted to law. The choice whether to ally with the US is a political choice regardless of the legality of its actions. And, as your quote points out, Trump has replaced the authorisation of war by Congress (an elected political forum) with the Attorney-General (an appointed law officer), and Congress is entirely comfortable with this emasculation.
And that, of course, is blatantly illegal in domestic as well as international law. But is unlikely to ever be adjudicated.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Strongly agree.
Though I'm also fond of the Baroque period.
All depends what you mean by 'music'. For me, in its principal meaning, it lasts from Bach until the death of Shostakovich and it is irreplaceable but as yet I have no really strong evidence that it is capable of being continued and extended.
For the rest, there are three factors which individually and collectively degrade it. The earliest work in which being unable to sing is an asset really ended with fairly early Bob Dylan and has not worked well since; secondly the increasing use of electronic forms and artificially multiplied sound has stifled originality; thirdly money.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
Both about Heroin.
I thought it was about Gordon Brown?
Golden Brown, Texture like debt, Runs through the books, No time for regret
Never a smile, Always a plan, Muttering forecasts Only he can.
There is, of course, a historical precedence for the UK recognising the Monroe Doctrine so long as we can have the Falklands and the US does not interfere with our policies in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Pax Britannia is back on. In fact, tell the French: invading countries who nationalise assets you built is now ok again. Back to Suez.
Joking aside, in the world that is starting to emerge I can get behind a U.K. view on the Americas which is essentially “we don’t care, we have other problems”.
Your Party has announced that they will not be fielding any candidates in the 2026 English local elections, but will be endorsing selected independents. Your Party in Wales and Scotland will be independently decided their strategies.
Your Party's inability to actually function as a political party remains a godsend for the Greens and Labour.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Sure, but we shouldn't expect that every entry level job allows you to become a homeowner. It's the start of a ladder.
The point is you can quite happily live on it, and it isn't poverty in any real sense.
The Thatcher and Major governments were excellent for the creative arts and popular culture in this country.
In an alternative universe maybe.
Of course the Wilson Government heralded the British invasion of America and punk was a product of antithesis towards the Callaghan government and authority in general. What did Heath bring to the party? Glam rock!
Well yes, but the Thatcher years were great for pop music, albeit despite or in reaction against her, not because of her, if you see what I mean. Would we have had The Specials, Talk Talk, Wham, The Pet Shop Boys, Happy Mondays if the times and social changes had been different?
Bucks Fizz's "Land of Make Believe" was written as a critique of Thatcherism, not that this is very obvious...
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
No it shouldn't, the 2 child benefit cap should have been kept. Instead child benefit could have been increased for average families rather than those on Universal Credit.
The minimum wage now in the UK is also very high now, £24,000 for full time workers. In the US by contrast the full time minimum wage is only about $15,000 a year and even in France only about 21,000 Euros per year
The US is not an example for anything beyond the fact that employers will get away with blue murder given the ability to do so.
Yes but given the average wage in the US is $63,000 and the average wage in the UK is £37,000 and the minimum wage is much higher in the UK than the US, it doesn't make sense in the UK for employers to pay not far off the average wage to employ lots of low skilled employees. Hence US unemployment is now 4% and UK unemployment is 5% and rising
Those are means. The medians are much closer. The US has a big wealth disparity with some very high earners, but most aren't paid so well.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
They seem to have run out of old #TOTP not hosted by sex offenders, but must have a vast collection of Old Grey Whistle Tests worthy of Friday night on BBC4.
Or even better, the Whistle Test of the 80s onwards. In fact, why not one of each!
Your Party has announced that they will not be fielding any candidates in the 2026 English local elections, but will be endorsing selected independents. Your Party in Wales and Scotland will be independently decided their strategies.
Your Party's inability to actually function as a political party remains a godsend for the Greens and Labour.
Why don't they just call it 'No Party' and have done with it?
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
That's nice rhetoric but in-work poverty increased significantly under the Conservatives, despite a strong record on employment, and is significantly higher than our counterparts elsewhere.
So no, child poverty is not solved by getting people into work. You have to pay them properly too - the kind of wage that allows them to support a family, not make us a cheap cup of coffee.
No, child poverty is absolutely solved by getting people into work. That's precisely how everyone else supports their families - by earning a wage. I agree benefits should provide a basic safety net; I do not agree they should subsidise lifestyles.
Public policy should not be led by the nose by lobby groups like the Rowntree Foundation, nor major spending decisions made on the basis of moving hundreds of thousands of people above or below an arbitrary line on a spreadsheet and then declaring the problem "solved". They will continue to sit wasting away on low incomes with a limited lifestyle and their potential totally unrealised. That's absolutely mad, especially whilst we face one of the biggest geopolitical challenges of the century.
I fundamentally disagree with you.
FPT you can't really disagree with the maths though - if you have millions of people in-work but on low wages, poverty will be high.
People in work have much higher incomes than those on benefits, as well as a career path.
Many on benefits get load more on benefits than they would working, that is the main issue. By the time they have rent paid, buttons for council tax , and then a list of benefits , ailments , no tax to pay , all hte child and carer allowances, etc then they are well above minimum wage and often well above median wage
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
The U.S. attempting to freeze the U.K. and EU out of the global banking system would have deeply painful consequences for the U.S. Those links are not a one way street. Swift ain’t American, and pushing the need for the dollar too far is unwise when other countries hold your debt.
I've been out for a walk out past the village. Got stopped by 2m drifts on one road, turned round. Another road and it's coming up to my knees. Time to head home for a cuppa and talk to you lot.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
Both about Heroin.
I thought it was about Gordon Brown?
Golden Brown, Texture like debt, Runs through the books, No time for regret
Never a smile, Always a plan, Muttering forecasts Only he can.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
They seem to have run out of old #TOTP not hosted by sex offenders, but must have a vast collection of Old Grey Whistle Tests worthy of Friday night on BBC4.
It doesn’t help,that they have very very few TOTP in the archives up to about 75.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
The U.S. attempting to freeze the U.K. and EU out of the global banking system would have deeply painful consequences for the U.S. Those links are not a one way street. Swift ain’t American, and pushing the need for the dollar too far is unwise when other countries hold your debt.
But "pushing the need for the dollar" is the reason for annexing Venezuela. Countries have started trading oil in Yuan. If that spreads then the petrdollar is over and America is crushed by the weight of its debts.
Invade Venezuela, cut a deal with a general, send in Exxon to reappropriate its oil, get the taps turned on, the world dances to American oil again.
I've been out for a walk out past the village. Got stopped by 2m drifts on one road, turned round. Another road and it's coming up to my knees. Time to head home for a cuppa and talk to you lot.
Sounds like the weather is snow joke in NE Scotland.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
OMD and Nena - nuclear war.
The Stranglers - Golden Brown The Las - There she goes.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
Our own banking system is very happy to debank people. Often for the most spurious of reasons,
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
No it shouldn't, the 2 child benefit cap should have been kept. Instead child benefit could have been increased for average families rather than those on Universal Credit.
The minimum wage now in the UK is also very high now, £24,000 for full time workers. In the US by contrast the full time minimum wage is only about $15,000 a year and even in France only about 21,000 Euros per year
The US is not an example for anything beyond the fact that employers will get away with blue murder given the ability to do so.
Yes but given the average wage in the US is $63,000 and the average wage in the UK is £37,000 and the minimum wage is much higher in the UK than the US, it doesn't make sense in the UK for employers to pay not far off the average wage to employ lots of low skilled employees. Hence US unemployment is now 4% and UK unemployment is 5% and rising
Those are means. The medians are much closer. The US has a big wealth disparity with some very high earners, but most aren't paid so well.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Nobody on bottom level jobs has ever ever been able to save a deposit and get a mortgage.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
They seem to have run out of old #TOTP not hosted by sex offenders, but must have a vast collection of Old Grey Whistle Tests worthy of Friday night on BBC4.
Or even better, the Whistle Test of the 80s onwards. In fact, why not one of each!
The Beeb probably recorded over Whistle Tests to preserve Mrs.Brown's Boys.
I'm sure the tape wasn't cheap, but the notion of going over the only copy of some BBC output must be the most penny-pinching idiocy in corporate history.
"But nobody will ever want to watch Doctor Who again..."
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
£20k universal credit plus unlimited numbers of children able to claim universal credit for plus social housing subsidised and no tax, why work? Labour is paying you not to and even with full time minimum wage of £24k any extra income earnt gets taken by the Labour government in tax to subsidise the welfare you would otherwise get
Because you'll get sanctioned and lose your UC unless you do.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
I'm surprised the BBC has never made a big thing commercially of the festive 50, especially after Peel died. They got played to death by me. I would have bought them.
They seem to have run out of old #TOTP not hosted by sex offenders, but must have a vast collection of Old Grey Whistle Tests worthy of Friday night on BBC4.
My favourite OGWT moment was Meat Loaf doing a fabulously loud and lewd studio performance of Paradise By The Dashboard Light and when it finally finished the cut back to Bob Harris who sheepishly mumbled, "mmm, hot fun in the city".
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
Our own banking system is very happy to debank people. Often for the most spurious of reasons,
Probably need to sort that out too.
The world is already seriously fucked up.
Excessive hyperbole does no one any favours.
What hyperbole:
Trump has declared that America MUST take Greenland. Canada. Panama.
Rubio yesterday said that we have a President who does what he says.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
£20k universal credit plus unlimited numbers of children able to claim universal credit for plus social housing subsidised and no tax, why work? Labour is paying you not to and even with full time minimum wage of £24k any extra income earnt gets taken by the Labour government in tax to subsidise the welfare you would otherwise get
Because you'll get sanctioned and lose your UC unless you do.
In theory but plenty just game play by doing applications for jobs they don't really want and deliberately performing poorly at interview or even if they get the job walking out after a few weeks. If paid minimum wage work pays little more than top end universal credit after tax plenty will continue to do so
they don't get checked very often, every couple of years if lucky.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Nobody on bottom level jobs has ever ever been able to save a deposit and get a mortgage.
That's not true - my house was previously owned by a Teaching Assistant, one of the lowest paid jobs there is (salary is term time only). She bought in the era of 0.5% mortgages though.
Have you forgotten the 00s era of no deposit mortgages/self cert mortgages/110% Northern Rock mortgages?
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
Universal Credit did that to some extent
The changes did to a degree but the taper could do with amending and the cliff edge is now the other benefits people can get such as council tax reduction and free school meals.
Freezing of the annual allowance hasn’t helped. A person receiving universal credit of £20,708 p.a., the standard adult rate, will receive £20,708 p.a. A person earning £20,708 p.a. from employment will receive £18,431 p.a. after income tax and Ni deductions.
£20k universal credit plus unlimited numbers of children able to claim universal credit for plus social housing subsidised and no tax, why work? Labour is paying you not to and even with full time minimum wage of £24k any extra income earnt gets taken by the Labour government in tax to subsidise the welfare you would otherwise get.
Any universal credit income over £20k should certainly be subject to income tax
Anything over the 12750 threshold should be taxed same as the poor mugs working to pay the slackers their free cash and lodgings.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
Our own banking system is very happy to debank people. Often for the most spurious of reasons,
Probably need to sort that out too.
The world is already seriously fucked up.
Excessive hyperbole does no one any favours.
What hyperbole:
Trump has declared that America MUST take Greenland. Canada. Panama.
Rubio yesterday said that we have a President who does what he says.
Other than the sheer militarism and nastiness you can't put a cigarette paper between Trump and Putin's attitude on this.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
Our own banking system is very happy to debank people. Often for the most spurious of reasons,
Probably need to sort that out too.
The world is already seriously fucked up.
Excessive hyperbole does no one any favours.
What hyperbole:
Trump has declared that America MUST take Greenland. Canada. Panama.
Rubio yesterday said that we have a President who does what he says.
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Nobody on bottom level jobs has ever ever been able to save a deposit and get a mortgage.
That's not true - my house was previously owned by a Teaching Assistant, one of the lowest paid jobs there is (salary is term time only). She bought in the era of 0.5% mortgages though.
Have you forgotten the 00s era of no deposit mortgages/self cert mortgages/110% Northern Rock mortgages?
Also, in terms of the public's willingness to support increased Defence spending I think people underestimate the public and excuse the politicians. We can see other European countries, not just Poland and the Baltic States who are on the front line, but countries like Germany and Denmark who are doing a lot more to increase defence spending than the UK.
Yes, quite - we have a problem of political leadership.
If politicians won't lead us there then why wouldn't many voters prioritise benefits that matter to them personally?
All NATO nations committed to spend 5% of gdp on defence by 2035, even if Labour backbenchers have voted to prioritise welfare spending
Well, that will be the challenge for the next Conservative Government, presumably in 2029. How will they reach the 5% GDP figure in the course of a Parliament - I suppose they could keep defence spending and hope GDP falls to meet the targer but, more realistically, how will they increase the number assuming it can't all be done with growth concurrent with, what I imagine, will be commitments to lower taxes such as stamp duty?
Well they would restore the two child benefit cap for starters Labour have abandoned and reform the likes of PiP Labour also rejected reforms too
Cheap jibes aside, let's get serious on numbers.
I've seen the UK is spending £83 billion on defence this year - defence ranks fifth behind Social Care/Welfare (£379 billion), Health (£277 billion), Education (£146 billion) and Debt Interest Payments (£123 billion).
Instead of wittering on about GDP percentages, what amount would you like the UK to spend on defence and from where does that extra funding originate?
Looking at the income side, £329 billion from Income Tax, £214 billion from VAT, £199 billion from National Insurance.
If you want to double the amount spent on defence to sorry £160 billion, how do you get there? What elements of the other budgets would you reduce or how much additional tax would you seek to raise?
Well you could cut the welfare budget to £290 million for starters
How? What are you going to cut and by how much?
Restore the 2 child benefit cap for starters
From what I've read, restoring the cap would save between £2 billion and £3.5 billion so it's a drop in the ocean as well as a cheap political slogan. Do the Conservatives have any answers or policies on child poverty?
Don't bother - let's get to the substantive. Kemi Badenoch wants to "slash" "welfare". What does she mean by "slash" and, more important, what does she mean by "welfare" - funding for social care for vulnerable adults and children, pensions or, as I expect, Universal Credit and other allowances - what about Carers Allowance, by the way, would you advocate reducing that?
Presumably based on the perception there are millions of "scroungers" all enjoying the best of life thanks to Universal Credit, the plan will be to demonise these people and use that as an argument to carry forward a broad reduction of welfare payments.
Will the age at which individuals can collect the State pension be increased - to what and when? What measures will be taken to cajole people from living on Universal Credit back into work - will the levels of benefit be reduced to the point at which it becomes unviable to have them as your sole source of income? Will the levels of testing be enhanced to weed out the "scroungers" from those in genuine need ?
What of the infamous "Triple Lock" - will the Conservatives be committed to that for the life of the next Parliament or will they challenge what has become the orthodoxy in recent times?
£2billion and £3.5 billion is not a drop in the ocean; government budgets are made up of spending like this, and such attitudes are what leads to chronic waste in public spending.
Child poverty is not solved by dribbling out an extra giro allowance at great cost to working taxpayers; it is solved by stable families in work, and that has always been the Conservative priority.
£3 billion isn't a drop in the ocean. It doesn't support the case of people like myself, who think the two child cap is an iniquitous punishment of children for presuming to exist, to pretend it is a drop in the ocean.
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
I think the two-child cap is bad policy and results in bad outcomes. But I also think that fiscal transfers are a bad way to combat poverty, and yet another example of a failure of Blairite ideology.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
I wouldn't say this is an either/or. Safety nets exist to catch people when desirable outcomes like the one you mention don't apply. This is the principle behind any welfare. I don't think it's fair to say the principle uniquely doesn't apply to child number 3 in a family.
Yes, the welfare safety net should apply to child 3, and 4, etc. But the main problem we have here is that the majority of people in receipt of the welfare safety net are in work. That's no longer a welfare safety net. That's subsidising employers to pay poverty wages.
We need to address that problem at source.
Alternatively reduce the cliff edges that mean people only want to work a set amount of hours to ensure they don’t lose their benefits.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
I think it is 90% poor paying employers.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
A single person working in a entry level job (the lowest of the low) can pull in over £22k working full-time.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room, or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
Take home on £22K is £ 1,600pcm ish. Yes it is enough, but it's just enough: you're not going to be able to quickly save a deposit and get a mortgage on that. It's at this point that life choices really kick in: if you marry somebody your combined salaries might be enough to buy a property somewhere, if you have wealthy parents they can gift you the deposit and guarantee the mortgage, and things start to diverge.
Nobody on bottom level jobs has ever ever been able to save a deposit and get a mortgage.
That's not true - my house was previously owned by a Teaching Assistant, one of the lowest paid jobs there is (salary is term time only). She bought in the era of 0.5% mortgages though.
Have you forgotten the 00s era of no deposit mortgages/self cert mortgages/110% Northern Rock mortgages?
there were still limits and your example must have got the deposit from somewhere or lived in a tent eating pot noodles whilst saving it up.
The Thatcher and Major governments were excellent for the creative arts and popular culture in this country.
A potted history of the 60s to 90s music is kids went to college (often art school) on free grants and formed bands, then claimed the dole while trying to get signed. Nowadays there's no free college and no unconstrained dole.
Suspect there was also a lot more grotty-but-very-cheap housing in the edgy bits of big cities.
If you want to move to London with nothing but youth, talent and a dream, where the heck do you try to live these days?
(Not quite Housing Theory Of Everything, but pretty close.)
Southend, Crawley, Slough, Luton and other similar shit towns.
Southend is a decent spot; faded resort towns have an absolute excess of accommodation and mostly have two options. One is to become a funky artists' retreat, the other is to become a Reform hotbed.
Suspect that big city commuters squeeze out penniless artists out of anywhere close to the big city scene, though.
That’s where my brother’s youngest ended up, for the reasons set out above, and now he’s met an Essex girl whose occupation is giving women false eyelashes, she’s pregnant, and within a few weeks I will be a Great Uncle….
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Two reasons: Radio One and Top of the Pops meant everyone listened to the same things, and playlists were eclectic. Nowadays you can go through the day never being exposed to any song you do not already like.
Used to watch TOTP almost religiously every Thursday night during the 1980s
Youtube recently started recommending me John Peel's "Festive Fifty" episodes - which have taken me right back to sitting with my big bundle of C90 tapes :-)
Nice, also, going up through the nested comments, I would put the golden age age of chart music only slightly later - 1977-1984. Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - Everything Counts = capitalism Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
Depeche Mode - Master and Servant - Sado masochist sexual encounters.
Towering Inferno's Kaddish album, described by Brian Eno as the scariest album he ever heard, is about the Holocaust.
The morning after the night before. Starmer is a worm.
I don't envy his position, he is boxed in from all sides.
No, he isn't. Grow a pair and align as a European block against the axis forces of Russia and America. Why delay? Lets assume Greenland really is next to get invaded - America departs from NATO as Article 5 is triggered against them. As America's new security policy declares us the enemy why are we even pretending these fascist fucks are our allies? They're not.
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
Back in the real world, America is too rich and too powerful for any fantasies about punching the school bully on the nose. America controls everything including world trade. How will the French buy English Sparkling Wine if America shuts us out of the banking system? How will we pay income tax if 90 per cent of the government is hosted on American cloud systems? How will your YouTube channel survive if America shuts us out of the internet or disables all Teslas with over-the-air software updates (as we fear China might)?
The banking system point is one I have made - we are totally exposed to the Orange one directing the industry to shut people out - and have trialled this with a few individuals.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
The U.S. attempting to freeze the U.K. and EU out of the global banking system would have deeply painful consequences for the U.S. Those links are not a one way street. Swift ain’t American, and pushing the need for the dollar too far is unwise when other countries hold your debt.
But "pushing the need for the dollar" is the reason for annexing Venezuela. Countries have started trading oil in Yuan. If that spreads then the petrdollar is over and America is crushed by the weight of its debts.
Invade Venezuela, cut a deal with a general, send in Exxon to reappropriate its oil, get the taps turned on, the world dances to American oil again.
Apart from the fact that the rest of the world is rapidly weaning itself off oil.
Comments
I agree your general thrust btw. A more equal outcome before fiscal redistribution is better than relying wholly on the latter to mitigate the problem.
" [...] right wing commentators lamented its validation of the poor, believing that it would stifle innovation [...], and also encourage the labouring classes to breed. The left resented the fact that it effectively provided a subsidy for rich [...] [employers], who were free to profit from inflation in goods without passing on increases in wages."
https://www.berkshirerecordoffice.org.uk/this-months-highlight/article/march-2011-speenhamland-system-1795
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PxhDIf-DK4
"Festive 50 - 1985" for example.
*If those that are in work.
“ICE accidentally deports Maduro back to Venezuela.”
Also, on thread: I have a bugbear - I always have had - about quite such a large proportion of popular music being on the subject of romantic love and/or lust. A worthwhile subject, sure, but surely not to the extent that 75%+ of popular music is about it? In any case, I always rather like songs which cover other matters. The Pixies, for example, who deal largely with aliens and space travel.
Depeche Mode - People Are People = racism
Specials - Ghost Town = urban decay
A no-frills assessment of the noble art from Tyson there.
Granted the Wikipedia article references a BYD single decker bus as the replacement that's not the case, route masters are double decker to match the capacity required on the routes.
It's sad to say this but I will be happily catching the bus from my hotel to client co on Tuesday / Wednesday next week - it's probably a WrightBus SRM given the route (94)
And imo THAT is a 5-25 year project, with the EU as probably the key body especially to defend the rule of law.
I think Europe's main advantage is that Trump has his head in the mid-20C about the USA's domination. But Europe (including me) perhaps has similar over-estimates of our own influence.
How will it all go? I have not the foggiest idea.
The minimum wage in the UK is also very high now, £24,000 for full time workers. In the US by contrast the full time minimum wage is only about $15,000 a year and even in France only about 21,000 Euros per year
Though I'm also fond of the Baroque period.
https://www.youtube.com/@wingsofpegasus
It is pretty one-note (pun) in that Fil analyses tracks to see if they've been autotuned, but one recent finding is that official music channels have been quietly replacing classic tracks with pitch-corrected versions.
The Las - There she goes.
Both about Heroin.
Edit: The price was inflated by claiming that the development cost was always included at the original rate, rather than spread across all the buses bought. So, over time the price was decreasing.
That's enough to live on, rent a decent room,
or houseshare, and start to build a career on.
I started on less.
For the rest, there are three factors which individually and collectively degrade it. The earliest work in which being unable to sing is an asset really ended with fairly early Bob Dylan and has not worked well since; secondly the increasing use of electronic forms and artificially multiplied sound has stifled originality; thirdly money.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4LybGX1d2YvaFIHB3VAxXx?si=DMRhw-C3Q2iq16krX-cG2A
We are not well prepared for that world.
It's striking how in US discussions the legality of this action is framed almost entirely in terms of domestic law & Congressional authority, as if it's self-evident that if it's legal at home then it must be legal abroad. Implication is any DoJ indictment is license to use force.
https://x.com/shashj/status/2007755594044768381
Dogtanian
Cities of Gold
Willy Fogg
Ulysses 31
Any universal credit income over £20k should certainly be subject to income tax
*Lawmakers* abdicating running the country to procedural legalism isn’t just about obeying the law.
It’s about giving up on doing anything.
The classic example of this is the US - Congress and the Senate have gradually given up on meaningful lawmaking (how long since a full budget was passed?).
Instead they, essentially, raised the Supreme Court to be the third legislative chamber.
And now that Trump controls that, he has the whole government.
A signpost is the recent trans ruling in the U.K. Supreme Court. The court said, quite specifically, they weren’t legislating or creating new law. And that if the Government wanted a different result, they should make different laws. No one seems to argue for a changed law - opponents of the ruling want the ruling changed, it seems.
Another - sure, the current law says (in effect) that any infrastructure project must take 20 years of lawfare and enquiries. But equally, the law makers can make different laws.
Trump came about, in part, from the logjam in Washington. “I will cut the Gordion Knot” etc.
But is unlikely to ever be adjudicated.
Texture like debt,
Runs through the books,
No time for regret
Never a smile,
Always a plan,
Muttering forecasts
Only he can.
Joking aside, in the world that is starting to emerge I can get behind a U.K. view on the Americas which is essentially “we don’t care, we have other problems”.
Your Party's inability to actually function as a political party remains a godsend for the Greens and Labour.
Europe has SEPA which needs to expanded quickly.
As for standing up to tyranny, do we have a choice? Who is next? Gilead to seize Panama? Greenland? Canada? And what about the people inspired by this? Argentina launches a war to liberate Las Malvinas. China takes Taiwan etc. This needs to be stopped before the world gets seriously fucked up.
The point is you can quite happily live on it, and it isn't poverty in any real sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DOGITIfAY
Invade Venezuela, cut a deal with a general, send in Exxon to reappropriate its oil, get the taps turned on, the world dances to American oil again.
Probably need to sort that out too.
The world is already seriously fucked up.
Excessive hyperbole does no one any favours.
https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/average-salary-in-us/#:~:text=The Bureau of Labor Statistics,$1,192, or $61,984 per year.
https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-annual-earnings-full-time-minimum-wage-worker#:~:text=What are full-time annual,to $17.95 in some localities).
In the UK though the average wage is now barely more than £10k above the full time minimum wage now of £24k
I'm sure the tape wasn't cheap, but the notion of going over the only copy of some BBC output must be the most penny-pinching idiocy in corporate history.
"But nobody will ever want to watch Doctor Who again..."
Trump has declared that America MUST take Greenland. Canada. Panama.
Rubio yesterday said that we have a President who does what he says.
Have you forgotten the 00s era of no deposit mortgages/self cert mortgages/110% Northern Rock mortgages?
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/03/trump-venezela-mexico-00710063
“I haven’t read it, I don’t propose to but I disagree with it”
https://x.com/jaheale/status/2007788201491255678?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q